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AHM Conference 2022: ‘Witnessing, Memory, and Crisis’
Located at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) is a research institute and doctoral school committed to the analysis of the remnants and narratives of the past in the present, as well as of the remaking of pasts into heritage, memory and material culture. AHM fosters dynamic, interdisciplinary and transnational research of heritage and memory, and brings together researchers working in diverse areas and fields heritage and memory studies, cultural studies, museum studies, archaeology, and material culture, art history, media, conservation and restoration, archival studies, digital humanities, postcolonial and performative studies, religious studies, music and theatre studies, conflict and identity studies, Slavonic languages and cultures, Holocaust and genocide studies, European memory studies, Middle Eastern studies, and cultural, public and oral history. Continue reading...
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View Organisational Board
- Conference date: June 30, 2022 - July 2, 2022
- Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- ISBN: 9789048557578
- Volume number: 1
- Published: 30 June 2022
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20 results
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oa “I believe the world out there will hear it and the suffering will end soon”: Witnessing Refugee Suffering
More LessThis paper is based on my experiences with meeting those who are both eyewitnesses and victims of violence committed at the European border - refugees heading to Europe during and after the “long summer of migration” in 2015. Over those years I tried to collect testimonies of the victims of border violence and war atrocities, mainly to search for the ways in which the media represents their stories in the public space. Base Read More
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oa Who are the Witnesses of the Covid-19 Lockdown? The Case of France
More LessAuthors: Louis Gabrysiak & Sarah GensburgerIn the wake of the COVID lockdowns implemented all around the world, and in particular since March 2020, private and public initiatives have emerged to collect diaries, testimonies, and perspectives on the pandemic from ordinary citizens. These calls for witnesses have been presented as a way to preserve traces of the pandemic for the future and to give a voice to all kinds of people confronted with the health crisis, in ord Read More
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oa Ruins of Utopia: Trauma in Post-Soviet Cuban Culture and Literature
More LessIn numerous studies of contemporary Cuban literature and culture, it is common to find the adjective “traumatic” or the expression “traumatic experience” to describe the socioeconomic changes and the impact they had on the Cuban population after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, by extension, the Comecon, in 1991. The loss of the market in Eastern Europe meant, along with the commercial blockade of the United Read More
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oa Telling the Memories of a Massacre: Testimonies from Dersim’s 38
More LessBy Berfin ÇiçekTestimonies of the massacre in Dersim during 1938 present new sources to social sciences, as doing a close reading on these narratives adds to the field in terms of breaking the silence of a slaughtered community and by creating strategies to interpret the testimonies as materials for history writing. The events in Dersim describe the massacre of the people from Dersim, an eastern province and modern-day Tunceli in Turkey. Read More
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oa Echoes of Nazi Propaganda in a Collaborator Diary: The Case of Dutch Police Investigator Douwe Bakker
More LessBy Nina SiegalThe diary of Douwe Bakker, a 3,600-page, 18-volume diary is the longest document in the NIOD Institute for War Holocaust and Genocide Studies’s 2,100-diary collection. It is a very rare piece of collaborator ego-documentation that gives an intimate, daily record of his life, work and thoughts. Douwe Bakker read, quoted and echoed N.S.B. propaganda, and clipped articles and pasted them into his journals. How did Bakker inter Read More
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oa ‘Novels of Witness’: Palestinian Novels as Acts of Witnessing the Everyday
More LessIn July 2021, six billboards appeared in Northwest London emblazoned with quotes from two novels from Palestinian authors, Heba Hayek’s Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies (2021) and Yara Hawari’s The Stone House (2021). Although novels are usually categorised as ‘fictional works’, by placing the billboards across Northwest London—an area with a long tradition of Palestinian and Arab diaspora community—the initiators wante Read More
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oa In the Presence of Absence: Curating the Unseen, Ignored and Forgotten
More LessAuthors: Britte Sloothaak & Fadwa NaamnaThe exhibition In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the Museum Collection at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020-2021) showed a selection of contemporary artworks and design projects that challenged the idea of collective knowledge and public consciousness through stories that remain unseen, have been ignored or could be told more often within large public institutions. A total of 23 projects were chosen ou Read More
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oa Archival Tendencies, Living Memory and Witnessing in the Contemporary Art Scene in Istanbul
More LessThe 1990s is regarded as a period when contemporary art gained momentum in Turkey – curatorial discourses in exhibition practices occurred in the Turkish art scene, and the local art scene became a part of the international art scene through the International Istanbul Biennial, private initiatives in art, and art professionals – in line with the globalization and neoliberalism of that time. In this period, memory as a tool for e Read More
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oa “Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are”: Aby Warburg, Memory and Artistic Practices in the 21st Century
More LessBy Mehmet SülekIn the last two decades, Aby Warburg (1866-1929) has become one of the main protagonists of not just art history but Humanities at large. In recent years, artists have also been turning their faces towards Warburg, continuously making references to his last and unfinished project: Mnemosyne Atlas (1927-1929). This paper will claim that this is due to similarities between artists’ increasing interest in intervening into Read More
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oa Becoming a Secondary Witness: Art, Trauma, and (non-) Memory of the Kazakh Famine, 1930 – 1933
More LessWhat does it mean to be a witness to someone else's pain and suffering? What does it mean to remember an event, the memory of which has not yet taken shape? What ethical positions can artists take in the acts of seeing? Speaking from the position of an artist, who has inherited the traumas of the Soviet past, I will discuss the challenges of becoming a ‘secondary witness’ (Apel, 2002). Taking as an example my art-le Read More
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oa Fallow Land: An (Inter)medial Approach to Biography
More LessThe last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) created such conditions for thousands of children that they have to look for their missing parents in different ways. Parents that went ‘missing’ never came back, others chose to flee the county and remain in self-exile, leaving their children behind. These conditions gave rise to memory erasure that later might be neutralized and remediated by the children through resignification of Read More
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oa El Testigo: Witnessing the Colombian Internal Armed Conflict through Journalistic Photography
More LessColombia has suffered from a complex internal armed conflict for over fifty years. The war has left millions of victims of crimes against humanity and a deeply wounded society. Most of the victims belong to marginal groups such as peasant and ethnic minority communities and have been systematically unrecognized in the public sphere. This paper will focus on two photographs of the exhibition El Testigo, first opened in 20 Read More
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oa Gazes from Syria: Media Witnessing in Times of Crisis
More LessThere seems to be a general agreement that reporting from war is of utmost importance and a necessary precondition to addressing a conflict. Reading and viewing the news in this context is often referred to as witnessing the unfolding crisis, even though the newsreaders/viewers are not present in time and space. Taking my art activist project “Gazes From Syria: Ten Years of Uprising / Multi-Sided Civil, Sectarian, and Proxy Read More
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oa Lives Worth Grieving for: Representation of Lesbian Suicides in Print and Cinema in India
More LessBy Priyam GhoshOne of the ways in which lesbian sexuality found coverage in the media in the mid-1990s was through the phenomenon of ‘lesbian suicides’ in states like Kerala and Kolkata in India. ‘Lesbian Suicides’ became one of the pivotal issues through which sexuality became a political matter in the public sphere of these two states, which further encouraged the formation of ‘the lesbian’ as a political subject. Since the mid-1990s, se Read More
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oa Home is Where the Government isn’t: Lygia Pape’s Depictions of Favelas in Chácara do Cabeça and Maré
More LessIn the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic, the home has played a precarious role. Not unique to the world’s present circumstances, history has shown that domestic spaces often resided in unstable political environments, particularly within many countries in twentieth-century Latin America. Such was the case for many who lived in Brazil during the military dictatorship (1964–1985). Seeking m Read More
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oa Witnessing Occupation: Memory Activism in Kashmir after the Abrogation of Article 370
More LessThis paper examines responses by Kashmiri cultural producers to the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution in August 2019. These provisions had, in principle, guaranteed the limited autonomy of the states of Jammu and Kashmir. However, the Muslim majority state has since been reorganized, by act of parliament, into two union territories administered directly by the central government without adequa Read More
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oa Pedagogical Witnesses Who Matter: “The New Knights in the Fight Against the Green Dragon”
More LessA central point of witnessing is to bear witness to what happened in harrowing circumstances. Ordinary schoolchildren living in a country without war or conflict, who did not physically experience war and related conflict, cannot feel any emotion other than compassion for the misery, therefore, they are unable to bear witness. This article will explore some of the pressing issues teachers and students are facing today. Read More
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oa Witnessing Absent Pasts: The Urgency and Difficulty of Memorializing Wartime Sexual Violence
More LessBy Réka DeimNumerous memorials commemorate victims of wars and genocides, ranging from Holocaust memorials to national memory sites of historical events and monuments of war veterans, but there are only a few memorials to commemorate a significantly large victim group: female victims of wartime sexual abuse. While the memories of rape have largely been absent from discourses on trauma because neither the victims no Read More
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oa Witnesses, Memories, and Places of after Catastrophe: The Vajont Dam Case
More LessIn October 1963, an enormous landslide collapsed into the reservoir of the Vajont Dam, a giant infrastructure recently inaugurated in northern Italy. The resulting waves caused the death of 1910 people and the destruction of the locals’ living environment. The event was labelled an ‘authentic massacre’ caused by human greed in a network of colluded powers that could have prevented it. This human catastrophe constituted a Read More
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oa Towards an Aesthetic of Ephemerality: Curating Documentation Footage at the EYE Filmmuseum 2021 Exhibition All about Theatre about Film
More LessBy Haitian MaThis paper presents a curatorial aesthetic of documentation footage in exhibition settings that accentuates the condition of ephemerality. The development of this curatorial aesthetic is based on the 2021 All About Theatre about Film exhibition at the EYE Filmmuseum. The exhibition reconstructs theatrical adaptations by Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove and scenographer Jan Versweyveld of canonical European f Read More
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